. . This was Jim Baker . . . Baker said, that after long and careful observation, he had come to the conclusion that the blue-jays were the best talkers he had found among birds and beasts.

As Blair noted, it was in the winter of 1864-65 that Twain heard the oral version of “Blue-Jay Yarn.” While staying with Jim Gillis and his partner Jim Stoker, Twain was himself the audience for “Jim Gillis’s yarn about the blue-jays,” a story that Twain described in his notebook as “charming,” “delightful,” and “full of happy fancies.” The reins of the story are given to Jim Baker, and just as the talkative jay drops acorns into a “bottomless” knot-hole in the plank roof, Twain uses Baker and his feathered friends to fill one of the holes in the narrative-plank of A Tramp Abroad with a story reminiscent of his journalistic tall tales.

They called in more jays; then more and more, till pretty soon the whole region ’peared to have a blue flush about it. There must have been five thousand of them; and such another jawing and disputing and ripping and cussing, you never heard. Every jay in the whole lot put his eye to the hole and delivered a more chuckle-headed opinion about the mystery than the jay that went there before him.

The charm of Twain’s “Blue-Jay Yarn” derives from exactly these qualities: humanized animals and deadpan, humorless, erratic narration. Just as there is no apparent reason for the jay’s fascination with filling the “bottomless” hole, there is no logical reason for including “Blue-Jay Yarn” in a European travel book. But by his use of free association and the frame-narrative, Twain gives us a tale that mirrors the pattern of the oral tradition, a style of writing that stressed manner over matter and form over substance.

As the reader forgets Twain’s travels in Europe with his companion and focuses upon the “humanized” voices that fill the story, Twain deftly toys with the reader’s human characteristics. The apparent differences between squawking birds and squawking humans is less significant than their similarities. In the end, the jays and the reader learn that the hole cannot be filled, and the forest erupts with laughter as the birds “guffawed over that thing like human beings.” Twain’s humanization of the bluejays is a negative comparison: “a jay will lie, a jay will steal, a jay will deceive, a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay will go back on his solemnest promise.”

Ultimately, A Tramp Abroad is about talk and voices, not simply five thousand bluejays. Subjects include the impossibility of translating from German to English or vice versa (chapters 1, 9, 16, and 18), the impossible absurdity of the German language (Appendix D and Appendix F), the pedantry of using obscure foreign terms (chapter 30), and the inane language of several young Americans in Europe (chapters 20, 27, and 38). Twain described A Tramp Abroad himself as “a gossipy volume. . . . It talks about anything and everything, and always drops a subject the moment my interest in it begins to slacken.”

In Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman proclaimed (perhaps more hopefully than accurately),

. . . this is no book,
Who touches this touches a man, . . .
It is I you hold and who holds you
I spring from the pages into your arms. . . .

Whether Whitman was correct or not, the reader who holds A Tramp Abroad holds the essential personality of Mark Twain. The book gives us a spectrum of his voices, in addition to those of others: the “inspired idiot” literary comedian who ascends the Riffleberg (chapters 37-40) in a week, when the trip ordinarily takes only a few hours, or who seems incapable of seeing the sun rise on the Rigi-Kulm (chapters 28 and 29); the moralist who is outraged at some European art (chapter 50); the pragmatic sceptic regarding Romantic German legends (chapters 15, 16, 17, and 19). In short, Twain is boisterous and playful story-teller, whose reporting with his camera-eye was always subservient to pleasing his audience. A Tramp Abroad defines the character who remains America’s most complex fictional creation.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Albert Bigelow Paine’s multi-volumed biography of Mark Twain, commissioned and begun before Twain’s death, is still the major biographical source.